100 Years of Contrary-ness
A summary of the long life of a dedicated contrarian, William Blau.
The Furies Visit the Smithsonian
Poem by Michael Gallagher in memory of Hiroshima Day With a flash that seared and blinded, the blue August sky burst open above the bridge, a bridge, this time, over the Potomac. The Eumenides had never tired though their pursuit had taken the better part of a century. Humorless as these ladies were, they had…
History of the Next 500 Years
Stuart Lyle It is only if you willfully ignore what we know about human civilizations that have come and gone over a number of millennia that you could believe that our current civilization is here to stay. Whether Mayan, Egyptian, Babylonian, Roman, or any other great societies of the last 10,000 or so years of…
The Cracks are Widening… and We are All Falling Through
Peter Van Buren A guy on Facebook I don’t know wrote a version of what has become a kind of set-piece article in today’s America. Here’s a portion: Losing The War of Attrition or How To Turn Any Normal Person Into A Broken, Angry Radical You are one of the millions who are employed at…
What Next for Kavanaugh?
Don Rose “What goes around comes around!” So goes the commonplace unveiled threat of reprisal from an uncommonplace individual in a very uncommonplace situation. I speak, of course, of Brett Kavanaugh’s tirade against Democrats and assorted other evil-doers who had the temerity to pose hard questions and actually (gasp) oppose his nomination to the highest…
Kavanaugh’s Hand over My Mouth – I Can’t Breath
I have known the author of this article, Heather Heller, for many years. Heather told me about being raped in the early sixties by a classmate in her senior year in college when abortion was illegal and dangerous, and the “pill” had not yet been invented. I saw a person, in Heather who had gone…
I Have Been Permanently Banned from Twitter
With a President who vociferously defends his use of Twitter to circumvent political norms, evade his ostensible “handlers,” and to stoke racial and xenophobic tensions, Twitter has become an important free-speach frontier. But Twitter is a private company and has chosen to silence accounts it deems abusive or dangerous. Not Donald Trump’s support for armed…
Pot Shots in Palestine
In Steven Spielberg’s film Shindler’s List there is a horrifying scene of a Nazi concentration camp where the camp commander wakes up in the morning and walks out to his balcony overlooking the camp. He brings along a sniper rifle and then starts shooting Jewish prisoners at random who are walking in the camp grounds…
When An Illness Doesn’t Count in Making America Great
Jamison Hill is an amazing young man. By following links on Jamison’s blog I have learned how there are many people in our country living with severe chronic illnesses that there are no cures for. They live below the radar. Yet they have this amazing courage that is hard for us to even imagine in…
Requiem for David Nussberg
b. traven is TCP’s co-founder. He is a 93-year-old WW II veteran, who is now a wine grape farmer finding peace in tending to his vines. Traven received a graduate degree in Physiological Psychology from the University of Chicago after the War. He has been a union steel worker, a “soda jerk” when they still…
The Contrary Perspective 